Introduction
The game
Dirt Rally is a very realistic driving game that just so happens to be about a motor sport that’s very fun. There’s a varied selection of cars and tracks to race on, and since so much of the online play is asynchronous you can have an active competition without having to suffer the people who play games online.
Where this thread comes in
Even though it’s a fun action game, I feel the one big thing keeping people from playing it is that it’s difficult from the get-go, and they’re right. There’s very little in the way of tutorials, you just start out in a relatively easy, slow-moving car and get told to go out and race. There’s a lot of difficult concepts it could be teaching you, and the car progression would be the perfect grounds to do so, but there's little to nothing in the way of conveying these concepts to the player outside of loading screen hints. The console release and its accompanying PC update will apparently include videos that are supposed to help, but I'm not sure if that’s going to be adequate.
Format
Each update will take on a certain car and a few aspects of it that I feel are relevant to it. There will be a video explaining some generalised terms, as well as a detailed write-up on one or two subjects mentioned in the video.
Viewer participation league
Dirt Rally lets you form a “league” where whoever owns it puts together a list of tracks. Whoever joins the league can then race through those tracks to set a total time. Each player’s total times are then compared and put on a leader board of sorts. I've made one as a sort of accompaniment to this series. Each update will have an accompanying season for the league, that should somehow fit with the mechanics I've laid out in the update. I’ll also be setting my own times and I’d love to see people beat them. Oh, and there’s no prize except bragging rights. You can join by clicking this link
...I’m not laying out any schedule on this because I can't imagine a schedule I could abide by. Let’s just say the updates will come often enough and the delay between updates will be at least a week.
The Dirt Telemetry tool - Cortextual's version
Originally developed by Zeb, this fork of their telemetry tool shows information for what forces are enacted on the car, whether it's from the engine or the environment. You can find it here
From left-to-right:
G-ball
Shows which direction the car is accelerating and how hard.
Average speed, gear
Self-explanatory. Gear number changes colour depending on whether it's shifting up or down.
Pedals
Clutch, brake, accelerator.
Wheel
You can configure how far this thing goes. Since I'm using an analog stick to steer I picked the narrowest range, that being 200°. It's clearer that way.
Revs
Shows how many times the crank spins per minute.
Weight distribution
Measures how hard each wheel is pushing up against the shock absorbers, goes red when the springs bottom out.
Table of Contents
Part 1: Best Practices and FF (video)Part 2: The Lancia Stratos (video)
Part 3: Rallycross 1600s (video)
Part 4: The '80s (video)
Part 5: Tuning (video)
Part 6: Hillclimbing (video)
Part 7: Group A (video)
Part 8: F2 Kit Cars (video)
Part 9: R4 (video)
Part 10: 2000s (video)
Part 11: 2010s (video)
Part 12: Mop-up (video)